For Liam Kane and others like him, the NFL title game was an opportunity to bet against new and often inexperienced bettors
When New England Patriots wide receiver Mack Hollins scored a touchdown with about 12 minutes left in the Super Bowl, the moment had the chance to be a shocking turning point in an otherwise dull game dominated by the Seattle Seahawks.
For Liam Kane, a 25-year-old prediction-market trader, the next few minutes were a chance to make a lot of money.
On the prediction market Kalshi, the odds of a Patriots win jumped from under 2% to about 10%. Bets on point spreads, which were quiet when a blowout seemed possible, all of a sudden rushed in.
The high wouldn’t last. Seahawks safety Julian Love soon intercepted a throw from New England quarterback Drake Maye, and the Patriots never recovered. In the end, Kane lost a bit less than $100,000 in bets that favored the Patriots.
“What are you gonna do about it? You get very numb to these kinds of numbers,” said Kane, who works out of his one-bedroom apartment in Philadelphia.
Super Bowl LX will go down as the first in America’s bet-on-everything era, with prediction-market platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket bringing a glimmer of Wall Street trading to the online gambling culture pioneered by the likes of DraftKings and FanDuel. For traders such as Kane, the National Football League’s championship game was an opportunity to take advantage of new, and often inexperienced, bettors—especially the kind who might risk a few hundred bucks after a few beers.
The 25-year-old left Old Dominion University before completing his degree. He is now a market maker through Kane Analytics, which he founded last year.
The free-for-all nature of prediction markets also made it possible to bet on every facet of the game, such as whether Sydney Sweeney would attend and which song Bad Bunny would open his halftime set with.
These markets are some of the most susceptible to insiders. Online sleuths found that an anonymous account on Polymarket correctly predicted nearly all of about 20 bets about the halftime performance, such as whether Lady Gaga or Drake would also perform, prompting questions about whether the bettor had prior knowledge of the show.
Such prop bets make up a small share of the volume on prediction markets, and Kane said he avoids anything outside of sports, his area of expertise.
‘They can get ruined very quickly’
Kane woke up around 9 a.m. on Sunday, then walked about 150 feet over to his desk to check the markets.
While eating his breakfast—a Clif bar—he scanned the screens connected to his laptop showing price movements. Bets were so heavily in favor of the Seahawks that he started putting money down on the Patriots, hoping to build an edge over unsophisticated bettors.
Bets on Kalshi alone were roughly $200 million in volume and many of the individual wagers he was seeing were higher than usual: $5,000 or more. Such amounts would normally make him worry another trader would be using some informational advantage over him.
“This is the one event a year where seeing massive bets coming in since yesterday, I don’t even bat an eye,” he said.
Sites such as Kalshi don’t operate like traditional sports books, which take on people’s bets using their edge, or informational advantage. Instead, prediction markets allow bets, or contracts, to trade on their platform for a fee. Depending on the outcome of an event, each contract either resolves at $1 or is wiped out.
The sites rely on market makers to keep bets flowing.
Market makers on prediction sites both buy and sell contracts, making money by pocketing the spread in prices between contracts. They also earn financial incentives from the sites. Among the larger ones on Kalshi are Jeff Yass’s Susquehanna International Group. Kane also acts as a market maker through Kane Analytics, the company he founded last year.
On Sunday, Kane estimated he bought and sold more than $300,000 in market-making trades. His nearly six-figure losses came from his own wagers.
Risks for market makers are high on prediction markets. The infinite variables in sports can quickly make many of the bets they are holding nearly worthless, whether it is because a player is severely injured or a team botches a crucial touchdown.
“They can get ruined very quickly,” said Sheffield Nolan, a former technologist at Franklin Templeton who is building a system to help protect market makers.
Kane, who declined to disclose his average earnings, rationalizes that big losses are just part of the job.
“When it comes to sports betting, somebody’s the mark—because it’s gambling, right?” Kane said.
Kalshi and Polymarket are regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and have said that the trading on their platforms is more akin to other regulated markets. Sports betting, by contrast, is regulated by states—and some, including Nevada and New Jersey, have sued prediction markets for offering allegedly unregulated sportsbooks. Kalshi and Polymarket are fighting those claims.
A spokesman for Polymarket declined to comment. A Kalshi spokeswoman referred to the company’s public statements that differentiate it from a gambling site, because it doesn’t take positions on markets or bet against its users.
A game-night glitch
Kane’s career in sports betting started in November 2021, in his parents’ basement in New Jersey. After placing a winning wager on Western Kentucky University’s football team, he figured he could scale his operations using trading tools and software to help set odds.
Kane is, in many ways, the picture of a typical American sports fan. He lifts. His hair is tossed in a TikTok-friendly fluff. Inside his head, though, is a junk drawer of stats and odds across any number of live games.
He left Old Dominion University in Virginia before completing his degree to trade sports full-time for a sportsbook. He learned to distinguish “sharps”—professional gamblers, who tend to win more—with the “rec flow,” or recreational gamblers who are less sophisticated.
Last year, he founded Kane Analytics to scale the kinds of trades he was already doing, and potentially earn far more money.
With so many games to bet on, Kane says he doesn’t get out much. The night before the Super Bowl, he was up until about 2 a.m. trading college and professional basketball games.
By the time the Patriots kicked off around 6:30 p.m., Kane started seeing problems with Kalshi’s systems—pricing glitches were apparent, and the books for making and taking bets had flipped, causing some confusion among traders, he said. He kept trading, and the issue was resolved by the start of the second quarter.
A Kalshi spokeswoman said the company didn’t see any glitches.
Kane spent most of the Super Bowl with his back to the television screen, watching his software update odds for various bets across markets. As the game went on, his long bet on New England crumbled. Kane did win a $30,000 trade against a bettor on the total number of points scored in the game, though.
After the Patriots’ first touchdown, there was “absolutely mind-numbing volatility,” Kane said. He wasn’t quite sure what had happened just by looking at the numbers, but the Patriots’ odds on Kalshi collapsed once again, and Kane scrambled to close out his open positions.
Kane said the losses on his trades didn’t bother him, and that it is part of being a professional gambler. “I was focusing on nothing for an hour, and then finally a bunch of action picked up. It was fun,” he said.
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